BladeRunner 2049 Beauty without compromise
by Jay Gee Three
Summary: A short filling-out of an episode in BladeRunner A.D.2049, when Deckard is confronted with Wallace's reincarnation of Rachel. - Deckard heard the stilettos sound sharply on the marble floor, he turned and saw her, in silhouette, as he had, the first time. As she emerged into light she was as beautiful as ever. But it was all so long ago. It was disconcerting to be...


Deckard heard the stilettos sound sharply on the marble floor, he turned and saw her, in silhouette, as he had, the first time. As she emerged into light she was as beautiful as ever. But it was all so long ago. It was disconcerting to be confronted with this replica of the Replicant he had loved. He was old now, he felt that truth in practically every movement of his constantly fatigued body, felt it in the sudden shortness of breath; the shortness of breath that had come on at the sight of _her_ ; the sight of her was still enough to take his breath away. She had been recreated young, as he had known her, when he was also young. He examined her appearance closely, was reaching out to touch her hand, to hold her; in an instant, he decided, no, the appearance was not enough. He had come to know Rachel in so many other ways, as though she had been truly real. She had been the apex of all Tyrell's development, that had been halted after his death. If people didn't want Replicants that shoot at them, they didn't want them to appear to be too real, either. Even though he knew, in his own skin, as we say now, but, as the old saying used to have it, in his heart of hearts, everything Rachel was, came from Eldon Tyrell's ingenuity; Deckard had accepted it, much as you would accept the characteristics of a human lover as a combination of what they been taught as a child, and what they had made of it as an adult. Rachel, nevertheless, seemed to have that other indefinable spark that made a person desirable. But Rachel had once been used as a gift to himself, Deckard, to seduce him, as an inducement, as a bribe, to have him 'look the other way...' as Tyrell's creation's spread across the off-Earth bases, and across the Earth; Tyrell had tried it with other Bladerunners, and it was a tactic that had worked; Tyrell offered the Bladerunners a time-limited love-doll. This recreation of Rachel was an unwanted reminder of how he had been taken-in, he was lucky Tyrell had been killed, unless he would have been a bigger dupe, but... you can't choose who you love. In retrospect, after all these years, that was the worst of it.

When Wallace had taken over the production of Replicants, they had returned to the Pre-series. Slightly less of a complete iteration of human life, they always included something that was not quite right.

Deckard didn't want any more gifts, from Tyrell, or from Wallace.

'Her eyes were green,' he said simply, wearily, and turned away.

He felt the concussive shot, within the marble-lined chamber, as much as he heard it. He looked around and saw the gun in Love's hand.

'Must you kill everything?' he asked her.

'You did... when you were a Bladerunner,' replied Love, she wore her hair, and dressed, so much like Rachel had. 'You killed everything. You killed Replicants.'

'I did. Until I met Rachel... And Roy B. And until I learnt not to. _She_ taught me that even these ersatz lives have value. _He_ taught me that if a Replicant can value the life of a Bladerunner, perhaps even a tired, old war-survivor, like me, ought to, as well.'

'Hardly an original lesson.'

'It was a valuable lesson to me, at the time. It was a post-war world, then; for most of us who had fought in it, and had survived, life was cheap. Rachel was part of my re-education to the essential truth that life hass to valued for itself. Knowing how easily we could have been killed during the war, knowing how cheap our own lives were, that we were all an expendable resource, gave us a low view of the life of the Replicants. It was easy for us to be recruited as Bladerunners after the war...'

'You're wrong,' said Wallace, interrupting him, his blind eyes seeking the direction from which Deckard spoke to him as he circled him; Love following his, Deckard's, movements attentively, like the predator she was, gun held at the ready. 'She was anatomically correct in all details,' Wallace said. 'We consulted the archives.'

'The Blackout caused...'

'You don't seem able to remember that this was in the pre-digital age, when digital existed but was optional. We had paper records of the Nexus-6 series, from before the Blackout. Her eyes were dark brown, there was light green flecking in them, though. It is your memory that is faulty, corrupted.'

Deckard glanced down at the corpse of the short-lived re-creation of Rachel. He felt nothing; after all, if they had made this one, they could make another at any time. He had become colder again, since her death, while she was bearing what ought not to have been possible; died with that small smile that she hardly ever smiled, looking down at her baby, at _their_ baby. It was with this recollection, that he suddenly felt savagely angry at both this hateful Replicant called Love, and her creator, Wallace. He saw in Love much of the same physical beauty he had seen in Rachel, and he also sensed the deep Replicant indifferent chill within. He knew that Rachel had always had the same ability to kick-kill as Love had, but she had never used it, he knew that Rachel had the same ability to shoot him dead as casually as Love had, but she had never used the ability.

Love demonstrated such savage beauty. Beauty without compromise, beauty without feeling. Killing without compromise. Too often, this was the Replicant way. She embodied such savage, ugly, demeaning, _useless_ beauty. Love was the embodiment of all he had known during the war, the savagery of war, the ugliness of war; she embodied it all, except the beauty, the war had contained no beauty; but the inclusion of the physical beauty in her creation, alongside the savagery, seemed to harshly twist the knife in his psyche; still, even after all these years.

He crouched then, down by the body of the re-creation of Rachel.

'You shouldn't have done that,' he said to Wallace.

'They'll never be another Rachel, is that it?' Wallace asked. 'Beauty, without compromise is our marketing slogan, as you must know, even if you do live out in one of the radiation zones - Why live in Las Vegas? We'd been looking for you in one of the abolishionist states further north. We don't produce the Nexus series anymore, the prohibition was too much trouble; but we could fill all our worlds off-Earth with them nonetheless, all slight variations of _your_ Rachel. How did you do it, have a baby by her?'

'You're the bio-technoligist, you ought to know.'

'And I do, she had a small cellular 'switch'. Tyrell had studied history; slaves could be expensive to buy - and his Replicants were always more expensive than the others - in the past the cheapest slaves were the ones born from existing slaves. But you're not a bio-technologist, so I'm curious how you did it, how you found it.

'She knew about it, and I asked her. So she told me. I'd wondered why the Nexus 6's were so anatomically correct, was it just to fool the scanners, or were they truly operable organs.'

'It's curious, isn't it?'

'What is?' Deckard asked.

'To know that Rachel, a slave-Replicant, is a legend, because she had that child. She'll be known about long after you and I are a heap of bones or ash, and forgotton. She'll become a part of _human_ history.'

'We had so little time together, less than five years, but she was longer lived than all other Replicants of her type, in those days. If I didn't know that Replicants couldn't do it, I'd swear she _willed_ herself to stay alive long enough to give birth. She was a month premature when she was born...

'...so it was daughter. Thank you Mr Deckaard, we knew of the child, but did not know that it was a girl.'

'" _It?" You say? "It_ was a girl?" _She_ was my daughter, and you'll never find her. After the Blackout, I tried and tried; it was impossible...'

'Impossible? That is what people would have said until your _daughter_ was born. If that is possible, anything is possible. There will be a genetic marker. If we, at Wallace, test enough _people_ \- just as you old Bladerunners used to test the Replicants - we'll find that marker. We want her, and I don't accept compromise; that is why I own so many of the off-Earth worlds.'

'Still, I can't tell you where she is, because I don't know any more. Yes, we tried to hide her, and I knew where she was, I knew the trail through the deceipt. But the Blackout meant that she was lost, even to myself. We've all come to rely so much on the digital world, everything has an expression in numbers, in the digital. So much of our world is written in silicone; our digital data is as transient as evaporating water...'


End file.
